🪵 SANDY'S TABLE QUEST
A Chronicle of Wood, Will, and Warped Taste
In the year 2025,
As the Mississippi rolled past St. Louis and the city hummed with quiet industry, something sacred was being lost.
Not all at once. Not loudly. But carefully, deliberately, under the glow of track lighting and polished concrete floors.
Craftsmanship was being replaced.
Once, St. Louis was a city of hands. Bricklayers, machinists, woodworkers. People who understood weight and balance because they lived with both. Things were built to last because they had to. Furniture bore scars, stories, and the unmistakable mark of the person who made it.
And at the center of it all was Sandy.
An eccentric, brilliant furniture artisan whose workshop smelled of oak, glue, and old jazz records. Sandy didn't design for magazines. She built tables meant to be used, leaned on, argued over, and inherited. Every joint was deliberate. Every surface told the truth about the wood it came from.
Her tables didn't just hold objects. They held lives.
That made her a problem.
The Interior Design Cartel had been expanding quietly. A syndicate of tastemakers, corporate consultants, and trend forecasters who believed that permanence was bad for business. They thrived on churn. On seasonality. On selling the illusion of meaning while stripping it away.
To them, Sandy's work was dangerous. It reminded people that things could matter.
They came in the night.
No alarms. No witnesses. Just precision. Her workshop was gutted. Masterpiece tables vanished without a trace. Blueprints were shredded. Tools destroyed. The radio smashed mid song.
All that remained was a single card, placed neatly on her workbench:
"Form follows function."
Sandy knew better.
She followed the trail through abandoned showrooms and vacant lofts, through shell companies and fake storefronts, until it led to a place most people pretended not to notice.
An office tower downtown.
By day, it housed design firms, branding agencies, and "creative departments." By night, it descended into something else entirely.
A vertical labyrinth of departments, each more absurd than the last. A corporate dungeon where stolen craftsmanship was hoarded, cataloged, and hidden away behind locked elevators and armed interior decorators.
Her tables were down there.
Sandy didn't hesitate.
She strapped on what she could salvage. She stepped inside the tower. And the doors sealed shut behind her.
Each floor was a trial. Each hallway a test of resolve. Each enemy a reminder of what happens when taste replaces soul.
But Sandy pressed on.
Because tables are not disposable. Because craft is not a trend. Because some things must be reclaimed by force.
Collect the tables.
Clear the floors.
Descend deeper into the dungeon.
This is not about design.
This is about legacy.
SANDY'S TABLE QUEST
They took the tables.
She's taking them back.